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Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#101

Post by seibelj »

asynchrony wrote: post #65
Alex3917 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean a good example of the need for DLT is the fact that no one in the country can buy romaine lettuce right now. Does it really make any sense whatsoever that no one in the country can eat lettuce for the next couple months just because one farm got contaminated with E. coli?

Putting lies into a blockchain doesn't make them true. Lettuce can still kill you in a post-blockchain society.

No, but it isn’t about lying as a matter of business, that would easily be detected and caught in most cases, and a large amount of work to continually lie effectively. If you have employees and machines writing lots of data it’s infeasible to tamper with it in real-time.

The tampering comes after the fact when a legal issue arises. The immutable nature of the ledger makes it an improvement over the past by preventing later tampering.

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#102

Post by autokad »

maxxxxx wrote: post #49
manmanic wrote: post #8

I've been working on DLT / enterprise blockchain technologies since 2014 and have insight into hundreds of projects, a small number of which made it to live production. Here is the bottom line: yes, it's mostly hype, but this technology does have genuine use cases - when you want to build an interparty database-driven application, and cannot find a suitable place to put the database, because of business concerns or r…

Sounds a little like the NoSQL trend where everybody jumped on it only to find out that NoSQL is only applicable for a few use cases.

I dont use NoSQL that much, but I also dont use relational databases much either. most of my work is in pyspark / spark on top of s3.

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#103

Post by CryptoPunk »

Animats wrote: post #9

That's bad. I thought someone would be using a blockchain for some kind of back-end settlement system somewhere, but apparently not. On the ICO front, the SEC is now cracking down effectively. First they went after the outright frauds, such as the coin backed by nonexistent land and diamonds. They won in court. Then they went after the ones that promised big returns and didn't deliver. The SEC won again. That settled…

>>Then they went after the ones that promised big returns and didn't deliver. The SEC won again. That settled the issue of whether an ICO is a security. It is if it passes the Howey Test.[1]

As far as I know, they never won in court. Everything was settled out of court.

A case recently went to court and they lost a key argument:

https://twitter.com/msantoriesq/status/1068246911533092866?s...

Former securities lawyer Louis Cammarosano claimed back in July 2017 that 1. token sales are a threat to Silicon Valley and Wall Street, 2. that the SEC doesn't want to bring an enforcement action if their case is not ironclad because they fear that a court will disagree with their interpretation:

https://youtu.be/psqCMwhDxZo?t=12m29s

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#104

Post by [deleted] »

drexlspivey wrote: post #55

Blockchains make no sense when the "asset" they are tracking have to be imported from the outside world because they lose the trustless property which is the whole point. For example supply line tracking blockchains. "Look this piece of beef was at place X on time Y with temperature Z, I have a hash and everything". Yes but how do I know that you didn't swap the barcodes or you didn't fiddle with the GPS or the therm…

[deleted]

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#105

Post by Alex3917 »

drexlspivey wrote: post #55

Blockchains make no sense when the "asset" they are tracking have to be imported from the outside world because they lose the trustless property which is the whole point. For example supply line tracking blockchains. "Look this piece of beef was at place X on time Y with temperature Z, I have a hash and everything". Yes but how do I know that you didn't swap the barcodes or you didn't fiddle with the GPS or the therm…

> Yes but how do I know that you didn't swap the barcodes or you didn't fiddle with the GPS or the thermometer was working or a million other things?

Game theory. Without DLT you make more money by doing these things. With DLT it just becomes the cream skimming problem, where you're just paying money to shuffle assets around but you're actually losing money because the total value of all the assets is still the same.

E.g. if you replace Wagyu beef with flank steak, A) you can only do that once rather than infinite times, like you can currently, because each asset still needs to have been originated somewhere B) you now have to either sell Wagyu beef as flank steak or else sell it into an unregulated market as a potential lemon, where you'll take a huge price hit anyway.

So it certainly doesn't eliminate all fraud, but it eliminates the vast majority of fraud by A) ensuring you can only commit fraud at most once per genuine item produced B) vastly reducing the profitability of any fraud you do commit.

Keep in mind that once DLT is common place, what's a status symbol isn't going to be the watch itself or whatever, but rather it's going to be having your purchase of the watch recorded in the DLT. This means that even if you do defeat all the tamper proof mechanisms or whatever, the original item is going to be basically worthless.

Whether it's going to eliminate 99% of fraud or only 97.5% of fraud or whatever in each industry is difficult to say, but regardless of the exact number it's going to be high enough that everything not on the DLT is going to be both considered a potential lemon and also carry substantial legal risk, and as such will priced accordingly.

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#106

Post by delinka »

harrygallagher4 wrote: post #100

I met a blockchain researcher this summer, I was asking her what sort of stuff she was working on and she started talking about supply chains. Like drexlspivey mentioned there are a whole host of problems with relying on data from the real world. My first thought was just... why do you need an immutable ledger for that? Not to throw buzzwords out, but why not just store transaction data in a database that scales well…

We decided a couple decades ago that an 'immutable ledger' would indeed be useful. And you don't have to expend tremendous amounts of time an energy creating such a thing. See Hash Chain[1] at Wikipedia, and notice the second sentence.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_chain

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#107

Post by flyGuyOnTheSly »

I find it a bit odd that this entire article and every comment (so far) doesn't even mention HyperLedger? [0]

The open source private blockchain project championed by IBM, Intel, Cisco, etc...

It's powering CLSNet right now. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperledger

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/goldman-morgan-stanley-go-live-with...

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#108

Post by sebringj »

I remember random recruiters talking me into speaking with 4 blockchain companies for remote gigs. I had a hard time understanding the value proposition and asked the founders types of questions like, why is this knowledge base better than stack overflow or why does this rating system work better than other systems? It came down to answer the question because "blockchain blah blah". Not giving the actual value to the consumer. It was more touting what the technology allows rather than real value. The killer app of blockchain is crypto currency at this point IMO. Not much else but I'm rooting for Vitalik as that dude is a genius and I still feel like something amazing will come out of his work. I would guess if you are going to use blockchain for something, make it something that cannot function without it and is one of a kind in being a new thing that people will want, not a clone of an existing tech + blockchain.

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#109

Post by nostrademons »

theoh wrote: post #99
nostrademons wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They make sense when the primary vulnerability isn't the person doing the recording but the possibility that the data might be tampered with or misrepresented before it gets to the consumer. Consider, for example, the problem of restaurant reviews. We know that one person's review of a restaurant isn't going to be 100% accurate, because it's subjective. Socially, we've figured out ways of getting around that, like so…

What makes your proposed system immune from abuse? "reviewers could receive currency directly for the information they provide, provided by the potential customers who benefit directly" The greatest benefit goes to restaurants with positive reviews, which are thereby incentivized to game the system. Blockchain might have solved the problem of trustless consensus with proof-of-work, but you are now introducing a new s…

It's not immune from abuse. It's immune from abuse of the particular sort I describe.

I'm not so naive as to think that all problems are magically fixed by blockchain, but given the number of posts on HN and elsewhere who complain about the power of big tech companies and assume they're tampering with or misrepresenting data for their own profit, it seems like people consider this problem to be important.

Re: Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back

#110

Post by spookthesunset »

nostrademons wrote: post #85
drexlspivey wrote: post #55

Blockchains make no sense when the "asset" they are tracking have to be imported from the outside world because they lose the trustless property which is the whole point. For example supply line tracking blockchains. "Look this piece of beef was at place X on time Y with temperature Z, I have a hash and everything". Yes but how do I know that you didn't swap the barcodes or you didn't fiddle with the GPS or the therm…

They make sense when the primary vulnerability isn't the person doing the recording but the possibility that the data might be tampered with or misrepresented before it gets to the consumer. Consider, for example, the problem of restaurant reviews. We know that one person's review of a restaurant isn't going to be 100% accurate, because it's subjective. Socially, we've figured out ways of getting around that, like so…

Why not just use a git repo for reviews? You can clone it and all that good stuff...

What, specifically, does a review system gain with The BlockChain?

And who pays for it? Blockchain’s aren’t cheap!

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